Adventures of Lehman

May 22, 2018

Happy birthday, Artie Shaw, and let us not forget when GIs learned street French, they pronounced the French word for artichoke "Artie Shaw." Married to beautiful women, an ornery cuss,excellent marksman, innovative bandleaderArtie was a great Gemini. like Marilyn Monroe, John F. Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, Dean Martin, and Judy Garland. In Tarot Artie is represented by the king of hearts. The two and three of hearts. appear in his chart. He lived a long time.His clarinet will live for all time.-- DL.

To prep for the interview, David (pictured left in this 1997 photo by Jack Mitchell) wrote "On John Ashbery's 'Worsening Situation'":

On John Ashbery’s “Worsening Situation”

Like a collage, I wrote, the bruised wordsShampoo the hair of the dog. Or likeThe simile eclipsing the thing it is likened to,Which remains unnamed. The feast isNear enough to watch but too far to reachBy foot. To up the ante, we get an echoOf Keats's last poem or a quote from Rimbaud.The key repetition occurs here. We feelWe have been riding the A train since 1965.Rides, ceremonies, rites. What's the point?Yet it bothers me, everything I haven't disclosedFully. I still read spy novels and get crankPhone calls. I'm like the guy whose wifeYou see on TV wondering how to get My collars clean. Tell her I'm somewhere Else -- Paris, Texas, for instance..

Freud was seen leaving the theater after a showing of Terence Malick's new movie "The Tree of Life." Our intrepid reporter caught up with the great man and what do you think happened? (1) Freud introduced the reporter and his significant other to Jean Piaget, with whom he had witnessed the picture. He called it "picture." (2) Freud said the technique was impressive and that the content was at bottom the "same old same old" complex that afflicted Oedipus, though in this case the murderous impulse was repressed, with lingering emotions of rage and guilt. (3) Freud's customary glare flirted with a smile when his female companion said "Brad Pitt was excellent but who needs Sean Penn?" (4) Freud said the picture was the best depiction of evolution since2001(the movie, not the year) (5) The bearded man in the three-piece suit, with the chain of his pocketwatch stylishly in view, and with a lighted cigar between the index and middle finger of his right hand, denied being Freud despite being a dead ringer for him. "You're not the first person to make that mistake," he said.

May 17, 2018

There are no words forthe greatest commencement speechwhich is devoid of wordsbut is the perfect blend of melodies, alma mater themesand drinking songs, thatBrahms put together in his"Academic Festival Overture"conducted by the peerlessLeonard Bernsteinlisten -- and watch

May 14, 2018

Happy birthday, Bobby, and let's hear you sing some tunes and so some impressions.Start with this amazing a translation of what Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht wrote: Bobby's impersonation of Andy Williams is amazing, and Vic Damone's version of Bobby is pretty close:Here's our boy in black and white:

May 13, 2018

Twenty years have gone by since the Voice was silenced by the grim reaper. But you can still hear him -- the smooth beauty of the 1940s, the roughened swinger of the Capitol Years, the Chairman of the Board who sang "That's Life" and "Fly Me to the Moon" -- they're all available on vinyl, tape, CD, and satellite radio.

But if you're in NYC you have one more excellent option -- you can catch Steve Maglio in tuxedo with three accompanists taking requests and singing "The Best is Yet to Come," "Summer Wind," "It was a Very Good Year," "All of Me," and "High Hopes" at the Beach Cafe on Sunday nights.

May 11, 2018

If you went “beyond the pleasure principle,” where would you be going, and with whom?

(a) the Italian Renaissance with Vasari

(b) the Spanish Inquisition with Loyola

(c) the French Revolution with Saint-Just

(d) the Trojan War with Agamemnon

(e) the American century with Henry Ford

Extra credit: Although this question has no correct answer, the question mattered to Freud because

(1) Depending on the patient’s answer he would know whether she was an Alice or a Mabel.(2) When the tide ebbs you can see which bathers are naked.(3) He had set out to refute Henry Ford’s line that “history is bunk”(4) He knew that “the present is a future that came through” (Frank O’Hara”)(5) He was certain that the Great War would have been prevented had they heeded his counsel.

May 10, 2018

Mother died today. That's how it began. Or maybe yesterday, I can't be sure. I gave the book to my mother in the hospital. She read the first sentence. Mother died today. She laughed and said you sure know how to cheer me up. The telegram came. It said, Mother dead Stop Funeral tomorrow Stop. Mother read it in the hospital and laughed at her college boy son. Or maybe yesterday, I don't remember. Mama died yesterday. The telegram arrived a day too late. I had already left. Europe is going down, the Euro is finished, and what does it matter? My mother served plum cake and I read the page aloud. Mother died today or yesterday and I can't be sure and it doesn't matter. Germany can lose two world wars and still rule all of Europe, and does it matter whether you die at thirty or seventy? Mother died today. It was Mother's Day, the day she died, the year she died. In 1940 it was the day the Germans invaded Belgium and France and Churchill succeeded Chamberlain as Prime Minister. The telegram came from the asylum, the home, the hospital, the "assisted living" facility, the hospice, the clinic. Your mother passed away. Heartfelt condolences. The price of rice is going up, and what does it matter? I'Il tell you what I told the nurse and anyone that asks. Mother died today.

In this book, David Lehman, the longtime series editor of the Best American Poetry, offers a masterclass in writing in form and collaborative composition. An inspired compilation of his weekly column on the American Scholar website, Next Line, Please makes the case for poetry open to all. Next Line, Pleasegathers in one place the popular column's plethora of exercises and prompts that Lehman designed to unlock the imaginations of poets and creative writers. He offers his generous and playful mentorship on forms such as the sonnet, haiku, tanka, sestina, limerick, and the cento and shares strategies for how to build one line from the last. This groundbreaking book shows how pop-up crowds of poets can inspire one another, making art, with what poet and guest editor Angela Ball refers to as "spontaneous feats of language."

How can poetry thrive in the digital age? Next Line, Please shows the way. Lehman writes, "There is something magical about poetry, and though we think of the poet as working alone, working in the dark, it is all the better when a community of like-minded individuals emerges, sharing their joy in the written word."

David Lehman has served as quizmaster of "Next Line, Please" since The American Scholar launched the feature in May 2014. His books include Poems in the Manner of... and Sinatra's Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World. Lehman is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry and series editor of The Best American Poetry. He teaches in the graduate writing program of the New School in New York City.

May 07, 2018

Jerome read first. His corporate sonnets reflect years of labor that Marx would characterize as alienated in the tall tower of Time and Life on Sixth Avenue.

There is beauty in a cliche just as there is humor and then just to clinch the deal comes the rhyme.. Well played, Jerome.

The host beckoned. I read second: I read poems in the manner of Catullus,Herrick, Goethe, Keats, Mayakovsky, Millay, Stevens, Dorothy Parker, Charles Bukowski, and Kenneth Koch. I also told an old joke.

David Shapiro read poems from his new book including "Why Rimabud?" and conversed with the darkness wondering whether you could see the darkness or whether total darkness was a poem. "As Kafka wrote, there is hope, but not for us," he concluded.

The mermaids sang to him and the crowd cheered. All were glad. Drinks were had.

-- David Lehman

(May 8, 2017)

<<<On Sunday evening May 7, 2017, at the Zinc Bar in New York City, David Lehman, Jerome Sala, and David Shapiro (pictured left) read from their new books of poetry

from 5 PM to 7 PM

Book Party for New Collections of Poems by David Lehman, Jerome Sala & David Shapiro

David LehmanNew Book: Poems in the Manner of... (Scribner)

David Lehman is the series editor of The Best American Poetry, and is also the editor of the Oxford Book of American Poetry. His other books of poetry include New and Selected Poems, Yeshiva Boys, When a Woman Loves a Man, and The Daily Mirror. His most recent nonfiction book is Sinatra’s Century. He lives in New York City and Ithaca, New York.

Jerome SalaNew Book: Corporations Are People, Too! (NYQ Books)

Jerome Sala’s other books of poems include The Cheapskates, Prom Night (a collaboration with artist Tamara Gonzales), Look Slimmer Instantly, Raw Deal: Newand Selected Poems, The Trip, I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent and Spaz Attack. His poems and essays have appeared in The Nation, Pleiades, EvergreenReview and Rolling Stone.

David ShapiroNew Book: In Memory of an Angel (City Lights Books)

David Shapiro is a poet, literary and art critic and presently teaches art history at Patterson College and literature at Cooper Union. He published his first poem at age 13 and his first collection, January (1965), at age 18. Subsequent volumes include Poems from Deal (1969), A Man Holding an Acoustic Panel (1971), The Page-Turner (1972), Lateness (1977), To an Idea (1983), House (Blown Apart) (1988), After a Lost Original (1994), A Burning Interior (2002), and New and Selected Poems (1965–2006) (2007).

(d) the need to repeat the same futile action and the madness of expecting a different result

(e) the rhetorical strategy of using the same word (or an anagram of it) in every sentence of a paragraph

-- DL

The Compulsion to Repeat

(after reading David Lehman's Freud Quiz #5)

I'm going to begin by repeating a phraseoft repeatedand despised by those like me who dislikerepetition for impressiona friend of minea poetmade a quiz about Freud:what is the compulsion to repeatto do the thing that scares youover again and beforgivenor should we ask Hitler about Napoleonand Russians about the madness of repeating the same futile action in hopes of expecting a differentresult repeat itin repeating your quiz, DavidI pretend to make a poembecausepretenderin Spanish is a lovely way to sayyou tried, didn't youimplied, the failure being the outcome of your compulsion,also to woo, court,pretendertry it is better than our word to berepeated repeat tryin a rhetorical strategyto be better than pretendingto repeat what almost wasyet another attemptto try and getthat Spaniard to pretend.

In a year of losses we lost a mainstay of the poetry scene yesterday when J. D. McClatchy (pictured at left, with James Merrill) succumbed after a long bout with cancer. Of his poems he wrote this In 2009:

<<<Poems accumulate--or mine tend to. Tremulous globules . . . an image, a phrase, a feeling . . . begin to condense on the pane of a larger idea. Proximity encourages their combination into something larger, moister, more glistening. Even so, there are times when some bead or other doesn't join, is left at the edge. Most are then merely shaken off. Sometimes, one is transferred to the notebook, a note too sharp or flat to go with the rest. I noticed a few of these, and strung them together as "Lingering Doubts," the title pointing to their common occasion. I might have let each stand on its own, but the age of the epigram seems to have passed with J. V. Cunningham. Hence this small suite of doubts, their tone of voice shifting from the ironic to the embittered to the plaintive. >>>

The occasion was poem Sandy wrote that David Wagoner selected for The Best American Poetry 2009. The richness of metaphor, the elegance of composition, were the virtues of McCatchy's prose, which was itself continuous with his finely wrought, formally ambitious poems. McClatchy did so much so well -- he wrote libretti and taught at several major universities -- that I would point to one area for which he has not yet been fully recognized. He was a tireless editor -- of books and collections of poetry, of anthologies and, for a quarter of a century, of The Yale Review. I love literary magazines and know how much work goes into editing an issue, let alone four of them in a year.I was thinking of some of the pieces Sandy published and remembered a day in 2008 that was brightened by my reading of The Yale Review. -- DL

<<<During the summer I like picking up an old literary magazine lying around from some previous season to see what I might have missed the first go round. To the hammock today I went with the October 1999 issue of The Yale Review (vol. 87, no. 4) smartly edited by J. D. McClatchy. There's a nice little piece on Auden by a Cambridge Fellow, Ian Sansom, and a very fine poem on the same subject by Jane Mayhall, which I am going to type below. In Mayhall's poem I admire the way the writing -- the line-lengths even -- approach prose but turn back at the last minute into the terrain of verse. The landscape imagery is sustained and given a biographical edge ("the wrinkled Grand Canyon of your face") and the diction moves from high poetic ("madrigal sunlight") to academic vernacular ("radically moral score-keeping") in a single bound. I think Auden would have liked "the dreamy / semen of a distinguished flotsam." It's a line he might have written, but he would have revised it out of a subsequent reprinting of the poem.

-- DL

Auden in 1970(photo credit: Tyrone Dukes / New York Times)

Uncensored Note to Auden

To bask in your intelligence, when the witherand time-gaps are stalking around me,when the literal husks and brains never tried aregoing to steer me off the road, I servicemyself to the faint yellowed pages of this book, itstiny lighted torch figure,

the running insignia on the spine ofa 1958 Modern Library Edition, and I come to whatever densetrilogies; compassion, spirited wit, wide-reachingintellect, emotional power. These obviouslyunstable and ridiculous concepts givenover to donkeys, ("some great

gross braying") predicaments out of date -- in theseI would take long breaths of pure joy. The madrigal sunlight,roboust willows of your radiant, asymmetricaland radically moral score-keeping. The dreamysemen of a distingushed flotsam. I needthat satirical pastiche,

April 07, 2018

. . .with John everything seems significant. "Mountain ash mindlessly dropping its berries" is one place where he put consciously himself in a line by punning on his name. The adverb makes quite a difference. When Ashbery says "ashtray" it means ashtray and maybe something else as well. -- DL

“We had macaroni for lunch every day,” John Ashbery read, “except Sunday, when a small quail was induced / to be served to us”

This produced laughter from the audience.Mr. Ashbery looked up from the page at us, and delivered the last two lines:

“Why do I tell you these things?You are not even here.”

But we were there — at least three hundred of us, possibly more — we’d come to see him, to hear him tell us these things, and more things. Every chair was taken in Wollman Hall and those audience members who’d arrived not late, but not early, either stood or sat on the floor. The poem, titled, “The Room,” begins:

“The room I entered was a dream of this room.

Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine.”

At the start of the evening, in his introduction, the poet and scholar David Lehman said that he’d studied Ashbery’s poetry as an undergraduate at Columbia University. And while Mr. Ashbery read from Notes From the Air, the two men sat side by side at the table, as intimately unacquainted as people sharing a table at the public library, each reading from his own copy of the same book, one aloud, one silently, and Mr. Lehman seemed a student again, absorbed in the poetry of one of his favorite poets.

Mr. Ashbery, in a white shirt, read not slowly, not quickly, and rarely looked up.

After reading from his published poems, Mr. Ashbery pulled loose pages of new poems from a well-handled manila envelope. Now, it wasn’t going to be possible for any of us to follow along, either from a book or from memory.

To hear a poem being read without having had time with the poem on the printed page is to feel mildly unmoored, and in between poems, when Ashbery looked up, his gaze was as piercing as it was opaque, which lent to the sensation.But his gaze is a private gaze that allows for privacy; one needn’t be seen drifting in public.

He read a new poem titled, “He Who Loves and Runs Away,” and then searched in silence for another poem to read. As he leafed through his papers, we watched in our own silence, staring at him so intently as though it was our duty to keep him from vanishing between poems.

“I wanted to read something, but I can’t find it,” he finally said.

He moved on to his translations of [Pierre] Reverdy, and then he talked some about his poetry, and took questions.

Of the poem “The History of My Life,” he said, “The poem sounds like straight autobiography, and actually it is, but I didn’t realize it when I was writing it. I had been writing about my own life without knowing it.”

Once upon a time there were two brothers.Then there was only one: myself.

I grew up fast, before learning to drive,even.There was I: a stinking adult.

I thought of developing interestssomeone might take an interest in.No soap.

I became very weepy for what had seemedlike the pleasant early years.As I aged

increasingly, I also grew more charitablewith regard to my thoughts and ideas,

thinking them at least as good as the next man’s.Then a great devouring cloud

came and loitered on the horizon, drinkingit up, for what seemed like months or years.

About the strange non-engagement between dreams and life: “We dream, we get up, we go about our business and a few hours later, we’re back to being invaded by dreams. The president dreams, the pope dreams. But we go about our lives as though these dreams never happen.”

Ashbery had read a pantoum, the title poem of his collection, Hotel Lautreamont (which also appears in Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems.)About this unusual form Ashbery said, “The pantoum is weird and rather frustrating — you have to abandon what you wanted to write and let [the form] write it for you.This is one of the only poems I have written on a computer, and I found it rather helpful.”He usually types his poems on a manual typewriter.

About starting poems in the middle: “The middle is where everyone starts writing.It’s not as though there is a threshold called The Beginning.The same can be said for the end — there’s no formal ending.”

Does he attend openings and visit galleries? He does.

John Ashbery confides that he is looking forward to the Poussin exhibit at the Met where he might see Poussin'sLandscape with Orpheus and Eurydice.

from the archives; originally posted April 16, 2008. Reposted today, April 7, which was designated "John Ashbery day" in perpetuity in a ceremony in the New York City Council in April 2006 during the John Ashbery festival we staged at the New School that week. Participants included Strar Black, Billy Collins,Jane Freilicher, Jorie Graham, Daniel Halpern, Jane Hammond, Bob Holman, Ann Lauterbach, Meghan O'Rourke, Ron Padgett, Jenni Quilter, Archie Rand, Eugene Richie,David Shapiro, James Tate, John Emil Vincent, Susan Wheeler, Dara Wier.

April 01, 2018

The Hollywood press was stunned to learn last night that Tom Selleck, who plays police commish Frank Reagan in CBS's hit drama "Blue Bloods," will be running in the Republican primary to earn the nomination to oppose Governor Andrew Cuomo in the election in November.

It is no secret that Selleck's success as Frank Reagan has translated brilliantly on the commercial front. It's Tom's voice you hear in various commercials, including one that asks you "what's team effort worth" and another that sells folks on reverse mortgages. Selleck's political ambitions have been bruited about since last August, when Linda Reagan's sudden elimination from the series caused a flurry of speculation including the possibility that she was involved in an effort to draft Frank Reagan to run for mayor of New York City, a move that would have been widely applauded by the cops and firemen whom Mayor De Blasio has offended.

Nevertheless Frank's decision surprised even old Reagan hands such as Abigail Baker and Garrett Moore. The turning point in Frank's thinking came about as a direct result of Cynthia Nixon's recent announcement that she will challenge Governor Andrew Cuomo for the Democratic party nomination. The former "Sex and the City" star is widely presumed to be a surrogate for De Blasi in his ongoing feud with Mr Cuomo..

Ms. Nixon, no relation to Richard Nixon, quipped that if only someone named Kennedy would run for the Republican nomination, there could be a replay of the 1960 presidential election with roles reversed.

According to the Nixon campaign, the effort to normalize the porn industry by depicting call girls as "sex workers" and feminist heroines has been jeopardized by Stormy Daniels as opposed to Bree Daniels as played by Jane Fonda in Klute, which is credited for giving a certain prestige to the oldest profession.at the time when Richard Nixon was in office.

Just as Cynthia Nixon's very name evokes the image of the thirty-seventh president, Frank Reagan's moniker brings to mind the feel good era of Ronald Reagan. This is the argument that won over Selleck. Garrett Moore wonders whether a run for Albany is a smart move for his boss, though he adds, unconvincingly, "I could be wrong."

None of this fazes Selleck, who reports with a characteristic sigh that when he received a call from the Cuomo campaign from someone saying he was calling "for Andrew," Tom told the caller to please wait half a minute. Then, when he returned to the phone, he said, "Sorry, Andrew's not here."

March 31, 2018

The emergence of a previously unknown and uncharacteristically fiery essay by Lionel Trilling is all the buzz in intellectual circles. Our stringers at far-flung camupuses report the excitement at faculty clubs and academic production centers where Trilling's essays in criticism, particularly those written between 1940 and his death in 1975, command a respect accorded to few contemporaries, not because he had a penchant for oracular pronouncements (he did not) but because of the nuanced style of exposition in his writing, which reflected a mind of immense subtlety, irony, and complexity. By indirections he found directions out.

The reputation for what champions admired as subtlety (and detractors considerd coyness) may change with the posthumous appearance of an essay Trilling was said to have begun in 1967 but never completed to his satisfaction. The essay's working title was "I Hate the Liberals." Victor Mathis, the archivist who discovered the draft in Trilling's papers, insisted that marginal handwritten comments in the legendary Columbia prof's distinctive script imply "that this jest was a place-holder for an ultimate title along the lines of 'The Liberal Dilemma in an Age of Economic Decline'."

That Trilling, author of "The Liberal Imagination," had commenced on an essay critical of New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay and of what was vulgarly known as "limousine liberalism," a phrase Trilling dissects, made news wherever talking heads shmooze. "It's like an intellectual version of Tom Wolfe's outing of Leonard Bernstein's black panther party as 'radical chic'," said Jenna Clauss of the Brookings Institute. Marvin Murdeck of the McLuhan School of Publc Information emphasized that the title, though evidently a joke Trilling enjoyed, was "deliberately reductive of his thoughts on the whole question of political hypocrisy among union-smashing NIMBY elites who are incredibly full of shit but should not be cariacatured nevertheless."

Handmade signs declaring "I Hate the Liberals" have sprung up in affluent parts of Ann Arbor, Madison, Colorado Springs, Ithaca, Providence, Rhode Island, and Evanston, Illinois. Some say this is happening in the spirit of a joke. "It's post-modernism, man," said Josh Lucas, a freshperson at Northwestern, who has not yet declared a major but is leaning toward sociology. But there are those who see in the outpouring of anti-liberal sentiment the hyperbolic release of impulses long repressed. Professor Leon Elson, the Hayte-Jacques Professor of Applied Kenesiology at Florida Ache, compares the "I Hate the Liberals" fad with people screaming out the windows, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more." Elson's point: "It's not so much a matter of art following life, or life following art, but life following life, and art, art, depending on how you define it."